Office Hours: What’s Going On in the Retail Sector, The Future of AI-driven Mental Health Care, and How Can I Help My Child to Become a Great Storyteller?

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Download the Viator app now and use code Viator10 for 10% off your first booking. One app, over 300,000 experiences, you'll remember. Do more with Viator. Welcome to the Prodigy Pods office hours. This is the part of the show where we answer questions about business tech entrepreneurship and whatever else is on your mind. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to office hours at prop2media.com. Again, that's office hours at prop2media.com. I have not heard or seen these questions. First question. Hi, Prodigy. Elizabeth for Brooklyn here. I wanted to get your thoughts on what's going on in the retail sector right now. I work for a tech company that caters primarily to fashion retail brands, and we're seeing a lot of these companies laying off large numbers of their tech teams, even as a lot of those teams work on initiatives to improve the business efficiency and profitability. I think the challenge is that retail generally caters to short-term demand, and that simply just doesn't jive with some of the longer-term investments that tech entails. I think these layoffs are probably an example of that friction between short-term and the long-term. I recall you saying previously that as an investor, there are simply too many things that can go wrong in retail, and it's hard going out there if you're not one of the nikies of the world. So how would you advise these retail brands on how to stop being so short-term thinking while still successfully navigating this near-term uncertainty? And what's your outlook on retail, especially maybe fashion retail, over the next few years? Thanks. Thanks for the thoughtful question. So I actually ended up in retail. I ended up having a company called Red Envelope. I ended up consulting to a lot of retailers. My first client, a big client, was William Sonoma. And generally speaking, retail is, I think it's the toughest business I've ever worked in. I mean, tech is the most volatile because you have zero revenues, zero revenues, zero revenues, and then you might get sold for a billion dollars, or you just may never get to, I mean, something like one out of ten software companies ever get to revenue. And so it ends up being kind of a feature, not a product, and then one out of ten of those gets to 10 million revenues. But the upside is so dramatic in tech that it pays if you spread your bets out or you find the right company, it pays for all the losers. Retail is just, there's a million ways to die in retail. You got to get real estate right. You got to get human capital right. You got to get merchandising right, which I think is actually the hardest thing in retail. You know, speaking of Red Envelope, the smartest thing we ever did, we hired, we took a merchandising different approach. I'm like, everything is about voice. And that is, Lula Lemon brings together these, you know, original technical fabrics and a feel of health. And I think there's, retail's been in a sense, kind of a state of stasis, and that is they just don't know what to expect or where to invest. Do you invest in real estate? Were people going to come back into the stores? Do you continue to invest in technology, recognizing there's deeper pocketed players ranging from Amazon to Farfetch? So sort of pity the retail company, trying to figure out what to do right now. The thing that strikes me, I think retailers are actually being pretty smart. I would probably reduce my investments in technology unless it was some sort of AI-driven technology. I think everyone decided that we don't know what to do, we don't know what to expect, but the great, brave new world of everything is tech. And sometimes these retailers don't get the best technology people, right? Sometimes the best tech people go to tech companies. And there's also a lot of the advances in technology, whether it's the cloud or gen or the AI, are all about, quite frankly, doing more with less. And so if you're Walmart, you have to have a massive technology team. But I'm not sure if you're Lulu Lemons, you need several hundred engineers, maybe, maybe not. And so I think they're smart right now to pull their horns in. And why is that? So retail sales are stronger than expected. Everyone's, we've been waiting for a recession and we've been a month away from a recession for about 18 months now, and it hasn't happened. And retail sales have actually been pretty strong. But effectively, if you look at the data, about $100 billion a month is coming out of people's savings. People are spending about $100 billion more than they have. And so what we're looking at, at the back half of the year, at the beginning of 2024, people are going to start running out of money. And that's going to impact retail first. And I think retailers probably read the same economic data I do and have said, we need to kind of get ready for winter, because this is at some point, we're going to have that recession at some point, that free money that was raining from the sky, specifically Uncle Sam, is going to run out. So I actually am on the side of the retailers here. And I think they need to, I think thinking long term here is quite frankly getting in fighting shape and cutting costs. Also we've had such a bull market in the economy for the last 13 years. We've stuffed so many calories down the esophagus of companies that were working in the form of capital and specifically investments in technology. I think there's fatty deposits everywhere. If Meta and Google and Amazon are laying off people, that probably means, that probably means the target and ASOS and trying to come up with retailers here. And Lulu Lemon should be thinking about where they can cut costs. Lulu Lemon's a phenomenon by the way. A company, it's like it's one of those valuable companies in Canada. They keep pulling a rabbit out of the hat. I mean, absolutely incredible. But I would bet a lot of retailers are looking at their employee workforces and the extraordinary investments they made in technology and saying, did this really pay off? Is there opportunities with technology to reduce our technology costs? And also, as always, the person that's having an impact on retail, even though he's not in retail, is Elon Musk, specifically he laid off 80% of his workforce and nobody noticed. The advertisers noticed, but they didn't notice the reduction of workforce. They noticed what an asshole he is and so they stopped advertising. But as a consumer of Twitter, would you know that they laid off 80% of the people? So a lot of companies are saying, how can we have the great taste of reduced costs or layoffs under the cloud cover and impending recession without the calories of losing a lot of our revenue? So the pain that you sense, the pain you're seeing, my only prediction, more. Thanks for the question. Question number two. What's up, P-dog? This is Ryan from Paris, the city of love. Just kidding. Anyway, my question today is about the future of mental health caring. We know that mental health is a huge issue today, especially with the new generations. Any talk often about that. The approach to it still looks fragmented to me today. You know, it feels like a trial error approach, like, let's try psychedelics, medicines, therapy, therapy with VR, nutritional psychology and so on. So when are we going to approach this holistically and maybe leverage technologies like AI to create a personalized plan and even create communities where like-minded people can come together to revive social bonds that are lacking today? So I wanted to know what are your thoughts on the topic and thank you for your work. I'm a huge fan. Thanks, brother. Paris, arguably the most beautiful city in the world. I would absolutely love Paris if it wasn't inhabited by Parisians. Oh my God. That's got to be a hate crime. Anyways, with respect to a holistic approach to healthcare, it does feel as if there's a lot- we become so specialized that there's a lot of people that know a lot about a very narrow thing and most people know nothing about a lot. And that is, I agree with you, generative AI where you feed in your data set of all of your healthcare records and it says, okay, this is kind of what's going on with this person. Can anyone really tell me what's going on? And then to distribute the healthcare away from the healthcare industrial complex, I want you to come to a store called a doctor's office, which is the worst retail experience in the world with the exception of maybe a grocery and gas stations and have someone pull back a slide, not even stand up, not even make eye contact and say, fill out this paperwork, which you have filled out about 4 million times before and create all these barriers between you and the person who actually delivers the value. A holistic approach using data makes a lot of sense. The big unlock you referenced. And that is remote care around mental health and the need has never been greater. The American Psychiatric Association estimates that are more than 10,000 mental health related self-help apps, nearly all are unapproved so far by the FDA. Most of the apps offered structured therapy. Basically, the patient gets responses to specific problems with a workbook-like approach. An example might be WO-BOT, I think it's called, which is designed to help young adults experiencing stress and wellness difficulties. Unfortunately, so far, the patient is going to be able to do that. Unfortunately, so far, it doesn't look as if these apps we can indicate or point to success here. A study published in the JMR Mental Health General revealed that the proportion of apps developed using evidence-based framework is unacceptably low. Fuck, that's a disappointment. Outside of apps, the application of generative AI and healthcare looks more promising in areas like clinical decision-making and risk prediction. The government has been taking note of the flood of AI hitting the market and is turning to regulation as a solution both the Department of Labor and the FDA announced last year it was ramping up its efforts to exercise enforcement. So I'm still very excited about remote healthcare, specifically mental health. I think just acknowledging you have an issue, reaching out and starting to do something about it is really important. I think talk therapy, obviously I don't want to underestimate the importance or some people need some sort of pharmaceutical intervention. I have my own self-care, if you will, and I'm going to share it and it's not obviously approved. This is not financial advice, it's not medical advice, I'm just being very open and honest around what I do when I am not feeling well. And that is I recognize that I struggle with depression in the form of anger. I hold on to grudges, I get angry at other people, but more than anything, I get very angry at myself. And I get super upset at a mistake I made, I turn it into a big deal, it's like acid in my veins and then a couple days later I am so deflated and down, I have trouble just thinking about anything other than just what a fucking idiot I am and what a disappointment I am to myself and everyone around me. And I realize objectively that is something else taking over my brain because as much as I screw up I have a wonderful life and a lot to be very thankful of. I have blessings the size of Saturn and I have mood the size of something much smaller than Saturn. I don't know what the right analogy is here. So I have an acronym around what makes me feel better. And I would argue that there's no downside to saying when I feel down, what gets me out of this and trying to set an algorithm or some sort of methodology or map or things that make you feel good. Nietzsche said, look at all the things, look at all the situations in your life that give you reward, that make you feel fulfilled. What are those situations? What are the common attributes of those situations? The sensation, the work, the people, the context of that situation and try and build a life that has more of that. I intervene with the following thing and I call it scaffa, S-E-A-F-A. The S, the S is for sweat. That's what resets my system. I sweat right away. I think that exercise is totally underrated as a treatment for mood and mental health disorders. C, clean. I try and eat really cleaner. For me that means eating at home. Get rid of the trans fats, the butter, all the shit that's stuffed into food when you eat outside or eat at restaurants and salt because it tastes much better and gets you addicted to it. But I eat at home really clean organic. A, for abstinence. Not the kind of abstinence you think. But I love alcohol and THC, but I cut them out. When my head's in a weird place, I'm like, I'm just going to take a break and reset my system and I don't need that sort of external stimuli, whatever you want to call it. By the way, I like both of those things. I'm a better version of me a little bit fucked up. I've gotten more out of alcohol than it's gotten out of me. I like it. But during those times when I'm going a little bit dark, I just don't do it. Life is for family, specifically time with my boys. My boys are so demanding and can be such jerks that it takes me out of my head and thinking about me, me, me all the time. I find them restorative and then the final A is for affection. Mammals are meant to touch. Being around my dogs, again, being around my family, flopping on the couch. Just a sense of community and proximity to other people. Back to your original question. Yeah, I hope there's some sort of holistic approach. That's the promise of AI is that you feed into it a data set and it comes back and gives you a better view of your world. I think healthcare needs to go from a defensive, disease-driven sector to an offensive health-driven sector. I think that's the opportunity, the disbursement of medical advice on our smartphones and our smart speakers and also getting to Paris more often. Hello, Paris. I want to go to the new Chaval Blanc Hotel there because I'm fancy because I'm fancy. Absolutely love Paris. Anyways, congratulations on living and what is arguably the most beautiful city in the world and for the thoughtful question. Thanks. We have one quick break before our final question. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by Cover Genius with 58% of customers not offered warranties for the most recent purchase. Traditional insurers have gone missing, leaving customers unprotected when things go wrong. As a leading buy-now-pay-later company, Zip wanted to close this gap and provide his customers with tailored protection for their purchases in real time. To do this, Zip deployed Protection Pocket, a first-of-its-kind solution ready made for a worldwide rollout that offers recurring revenue bundles, that is, Rundals, a checkout. This solution offers banking customers a more convenient experience that also relies on transaction monitoring, which is what 70% of them want. Driven by similar needs, eBay switched from their legacy insurance provider and grew warranty sales by 500% within weeks. All while making customers happier with an MPS of 65, they achieved this, they achieved this with AI back pricing and by expanding it to new categories but most importantly, they're also set up for Rundals. Merchants, including eBay and Zip, can easily expand into all 50 states with more than 60 countries off the back of a single API call and they can drive loyalty with the other side of their marketplaces with solutions including shipping, product liability and tailored commercial protection. The partner behind all of this change is Cover Genius. It's available at Amazon, eBay, Wayfair, SeatGeek, Hopper, Turkish Airlines into it and many more. Cover Genius is the insured tech for embedded protection. Learn more at Cover Genius.com slash Prof G today. Support for this podcast comes from subversive capital. It's possible to both pursue your interests and make money without compromising either. With subversive suite of thematic exchange traded funds, you can do both with less risk and volatility than individual stock picks. You can invest in the fight against climate change with the decarbonization ETF, put your money where your heart is with the mental health and food security's ETF or keep your finger on the pulse of policy and your values with our Republican and Democratic congressional trading ETFs, Nancy and Cruz in partnership with Unusual Wales. Check out subversive ETFs to learn more and start investing in our collective future today. Marketing involves risk before investing carefully consider the fund's investment objective, risks, charges and expenses in the prospectus at subversive ETFs.com. Read carefully. Quasar Distributors LLC. Welcome back. Question number three. Dear Prof G, this is Dr. C from Toronto, Canada and St. Paulo, Brazil. I have just listened to your episode in which you explain why storytelling is the most underrated yet perhaps the most important skill we should be teaching our children. I couldn't agree more. After 22 years of management consulting, including eight years as a partner, I got to see the upside of superior storytelling. This is in essence what partners do in consulting or investment banking or any other senior positions. As a parent, on the other hand, I have been experiencing mostly the downside of storytelling, either in the form of honest incompetence, when there is subpar fact-checking or no-fact-checking at all, or dishonesty in the form of misinformation. This honest storytelling is certainly what populists and or dictators do best. Given the downside of storytelling, I have two questions for you. First, what do you do as a parent so that your child can become a savvier consumer of stories? And second, as an educator, do you think universities should do more on how to become better consumers of stories? Thank you for your wonderful podcast series. This is a thoughtful question Dr. C that touches on a bunch of things. There's raising kids to be good storytellers, and then there's sort of this post-truth world that we're entering that's really entered, that's really unfortunate. As it relates to raising storytellers, a good storytellers, I remember thinking, you know, I do so much virtue signaling on this program, and I pretend to be such a better father than I actually am, and I've been talking about how important storytelling is for a while, and I'm like, well, okay, boss, what are you actually doing about it to try and help your kids be better storytellers? So I've been doing dumb things, like at dinner when my 12-year-old won't be quiet, but my 15-year-old won't say anything, I tasked the 15-year-old with starting a conversation. When they're telling me stuff, I ask them to continue. What I'm going to start doing, I haven't done it yet, is to actually come up with stories. I started by telling them stories of their grandparents, how they met, immigrating from Britain, moving to Canada, their drive across the US, and an Austin mini-metro when my mom was seven months pregnant, and they're enthralled by it, and I think that them hearing stories, I hope, gets them to be better storytellers. The schools I'll give it to them are trying to pull that out of them. My son went to this wonderful school, or my son's called Gulfstream, and their eighth-grade, every eighth-grader has to stand up in front of the entire community of the school, including the parents, and do a 10 or 15-minute talk. My son did his talk on the whaling industry in Nantucket. God, could that be a wider topic? Seriously, all of a sudden, he just felt exceptionally caucasian and privileged. Anyways, and it's great. He thinks about it, and he has to do it with slides, and he's nervous about it, and it's hard for a 13-year-old to stand up in front of people. The only confidence I have is communications. I know how to communicate, I know how to write, I know how to put together slides, I know how to get a good twist of phrase, right? And that is how I've made my living. And I'm immediately recognized with younger people, they have to be able to be good storytellers if they wanted to be a business in consulting. If you're really amazing with technology, but you can't spend a story, that's the COO or the CTO Max, you can be less good and a great storyteller, and you call that woman CEO. The ability to communicate your ideas and attract capital, human and financial, is the whole shooting match. How do you get people to be good storytellers? One is practice. Two is different mediums. I would start with the written word. I think if you can express your thoughts cogently by writing them out, the other stuff's going to get much easier. And then just practice, and specifically a lot of confidence and trial and error around speaking in front of people. And I'm credited with being a good communicator and a good speaker. I get paid a lot of money to speak and I have panic attacks. Sometimes I get so fucking nervous and I freak out and I get on stage and I start talking and I start gasping and swallowing air. And I feel as if I'm dying and the whole audience freaks out because I look like I'm in the midst of a heart attack. And so if you're nervous in front of people, if you think I can just never do it and I need to avoid it, think again. Think again. This is how I make my living and I get panic attacks. And you have to get over it. You have to figure it out. I'm not suggesting you're going to be Tony Robbins. I'm not suggesting you're going to be my Angelou, but you got to have a certain minimum acceptable presentation skills. It's painful. Take classes. Go to Toastmasters. Whatever you need to do. I am trying to figure out a way to put my kids in context where they get more of that, more experience at that. Creative writing, etc. The second part of your question, I'm really worried about a post-truth world. The biggest fear I have about generative AI is I would say, okay, give me 10 tweets about how vaccines alter your DNA that sound real and like they came from a medical established agency or a medical think tank. And it'll produce 10 tweets that are false, have no scientific verification or scientific veracity, but sound kind of real. Veracity has really become a function of who is the loudest and who has the biggest following. If Donald Trump says a lie long enough, it starts to become less of a lie. What do we do about that? I don't know. Invest in organizations that have fact-checking, whether it's the Wall Street Journal or PBS or the BBC or Love them or hate them, the post and the New York Times. They have a viewpoint, but they do take fact-checking very seriously. Don't advertise on Fox News. It should be called Fox Entertainment where the anchors coordinate to spread information and lies that they know are lies because they think it'll inflame their audience and sell more hearing aids. I mean, that bullshit is really, that's mendacious. That's an abuse of your position and society. What else can we do? Remove Section 230 or have carve-outs such as the social media algorithms. If they are circulating lies, it results in teen depression or misuse of medical treatment or a belief that an election is rigged when they know it's not rigged. They should have the same type of liability they have out now with a carve-out around sex trafficking. If you put information on Facebook, the results in the trafficking of a minor, meta is liable. Guess what? It reduced it a lot. Do we want to reduce election misinformation, vaccine misinformation, medical information, data or content that gives kids suicidal ideation? Oh, no, it'd be too complex. No, you could do it. They could absolutely do it. Just give them financial incentive to do it. In some, I haven't figured this out, but I recognize the importance of trying to do some things that help my kids develop those skills. Some of them are uncomfortable. I don't have definitive answers. I just know if we want to appreciate the truth, we have to appreciate the truth and reward those that are fact-checking and punish those that believe they can turn a lie into the truth by just telling it over and over. Thanks for the question. Dr. C from Toronto, the friendly, clean Canada. Go Leafs! Go Leafs! That's all for this episode. If you'd like to submit a question, please email a voice recording to officehoursaproppedromedia.com. Again, that's officehoursaproppedromedia.com. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod. From the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy No Malice as read by George Hahn and on Monday with our weekly markets show.